Thanks to completing an IT GNVQ during my secondary school days, databases aren’t all that new to me. I had experience querying a relational database in Microsoft Access already. But for the purpose of this post, I’ll revisit some core principles. The first to example is the types of database, which I’ll use an infographic to explain; Now what we’ll be looking this post is the relational model. This works by having a series of tables linked by public and foreign keys. Each of these keys has to be completely unique. When we update our database, we term this as a transaction. This means one or more changes are performed to a database. To commit a change we need to ensure transactions follow the four standard principles of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability. Before we go into talking about querying our relational database, let’s get into the NULL value. When searching we can use IS NULL and IS NOT NULL, but beyond this, there are several useful things to know about this v...

Due to having an industry connection, I had the opportunity to do something really fun this weekend. The application running on AWS is a CRUD API - however, Datadog, a Cloud Analytics & Monitoring agent has been installed to provide feedback on what's actually happening. I found this so beyond awesome, the scope of this product is really impressive.  On the left side you can see a command line running on my Linux VM. On the right you can see a live monitoring of the AWS machine, tracking the inputs received on the API application.  As I send commands into the CRUDE API application, DataDog continues monitoring and updating our dashboard. If you can imagine for the deployment of a much busier service, the possibilities of this kind of real-time monitoring isn't to be underestimated.   Above you can see the CPU usage graphs, but unlike the ones you find on the AWS console, you can see that DataDog manages to also show us the split of the CPU usage.  Even in th...

  Having signed up to the AWS Skill Builder I thought it was something I'd be looking at post-programme. However the above builder labs email landed, I thought, what better way to spend my Sunday afternoon? So the fundamentals lab was working with the AWS service CodeCommit. Having gone through most of gitimmersion  this lab felt very straight forward. It involved creating a local and "remote" (ie. CloudCommit) git repository and synchronising them together. The intermediate lab now proved a little more tricky. First of all was to comprehend that we were going to build a CI/CD pipeline - ie. manifesting the principles of DevOps. Below I've posted a full scale CI/CD pipeline to demonstrate the complexity. However, in this lab we're only using CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, AWS ECR and ECS. This lab involved the most complex technology stack I've come across thus far, so really appreciated doing something a little more challenging. However, it did involve so...

Security is the practice of protecting valuable assets. When we talk about information security, cyber security is actually just a subset of this discipline. Cybersecurity is focused on protecting digital related devices – like networks, systems and digital information. Focus on stopping unauthorised access, malicious actions like theft, destruction or alteration or simply disrupting the service. One of the most popular models for thinking about information security is the CIA triad. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.  Threats can come in many different forms. The tables below provide some a variety and most interestingly also explore what part of the Triad is impacted.    So, working with the security lifecycle model we can determine what actions we can take at each stage to deliver a robust security infrastructure within our organisation.  Prevention Identify assets – what devices are you using? Are they contemporary? Can you flash newer firmware on them,...